Recycling Equals Cash for the Community, and Other Tips from an Oak Park Commission’s SOCRRA Tour

(Leslie Ellis, March 6, 2023)

Troy, MI – What do a deer head and a lost wallet have in common?

Surprisingly, both have ended up at the Southeastern Oakland County Resource Recovery Authority recycling facility in Troy, according to General Manager Jeff McKeen.

McKeen shared this humorous tidbit with Oak Park Recycling and Environmental Conservation Commission members during a tour of the SOCRRA site, which recycles 200,000 pounds of material each day. The materials are received from the 12 SOCRRA communities of Oak Park, Berkley, Beverly Hills, Birmingham, Clawson, Ferndale, Hazel Park, Huntington Woods, Lathrup Village, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak and Troy.

“SOCRRA member communities earn a rebate for every ton of recyclables collected by SOCRRA. Every piece of paper, bottle or can set in a recycling cart is ‘cash’ for the community,” SOCRRA says. “For our member communities, recycling avoids disposal costs, and provides revenue sharing on the sale of recyclables once they are sorted and processed by SOCRRA. Participating in your community’s recycling program will help to offset costs to operate recycling and trash collection services.”

During the recycling facility tour, McKeen shared some tips about how residents in member communities like Oak Park can recycle more efficiently:

What does SOCRRA accept for curbside recycling?: newspapers, junk mail, cardboard, magazines, office paper, empty metal and aerosol cans, plastic bottles, plastic jugs, plastic containers, milk cartons, juice boxes, and all colors of glass bottles and glass jars.
What does SOCRRA not accept for curbside recycling?: bulky metal or plastic items, chains, Christmas lights, hangers, drinking straws, Styrofoam, batteries, plastic bags, plastic wrap, VHS tapes, cassettes, CDs and yard waste. These materials either aren’t accepted or can clog up the facility’s machinery. Given that the SOCRRA crew has to clear literal mountains of recycling from the facility floor every day, any slowdown can be costly.
What am I supposed to do with these items then? Type the item you want to recycle into SOCRRA’s “Waste Wizard” tool at org/waste-wizard to learn how to recycle or safely dispose of it.
How do I prepare cardboard for recycling? All cardboard must be placed in your recycling cart. Flatten it completely and reduce pieces so all cardboard fits in your cart. Remove and dispose of all packing material. Fun fact: Cardboard is the most lucrative type of material SOCRRA recycles!
How do I prepare other materials? Lids can be on or off, but make sure all containers are clean. Contamination can prevent items from being recycled and, in the case of food waste, attract rodents. Keep all recycling loose. It doesn’t need to be tied up or sorted into paper bags.

Does SOCRRA have a robot though? Beep, boop, beep, boop! Well, actually, SOCRRA does have a recycling robot. The machine uses artificial intelligence technology to scan a fast-moving conveyor belt and automatically sort materials into the proper bin. Not only is the robot cool, it also increases the amount of materials the facility can process each day. That’s super helpful since the number of human workers available to do the demanding job of sorting recycling materials as they whiz by has declined since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Well, that’s all very interesting, but what about the deer head and lost wallet? McKeen says they are among the most unusual things the SOCRRA team has seen come into the facility. The deer head remains a mystery. But, the lost wallets, less so. McKeen says he’s received several worried calls from wives whose husbands misplaced their wallets with the recycling over the years.

“It’s always the husbands,” he chuckles.

Visit socrra.org to learn how to set up school or business recycling, schedule a recycling drop-off or school assembly, and more.